Cash-starved Boeing, contending with massive financial losses from a crippling strike and years of operational and safety problems, is turning to major banks and Wall Street to raise tens of billions of dollars in cash.
In a regulatory filing early Tuesday, the company announced plans to borrow $10 billion from a consortium of banks. It also separately announced plans to raise $25 billion by selling stock and debt.
The company’s debt surged in the last six years as Boeing reported core operating losses of more than $33 billion. Its commercial airplane production has ground to a near halt by a month-long strike by 33,000 members of the International Association of Machinists.
Except building the technical and logistical capability to build planes on the scale of Boeing takes decades of effort and billions in investments. And in that time, one of the major logistical lynchpins for the entire US economy is just fucking gone. That’s not just going to suck in the short term, that’s going to cripple us as a country for fucking decades.
But yeah, free market, weee!
There’s smaller companies like Boom which would probably love to get so much space and opportunity for cash flow just producing parts while they develop their own planes. Lockheed Martin while mostly military nowadays used to be in the consumer space and could also probably be talked into taking some of the load.